Anthropology and Archaeology: Year In Review 2007

Researchers presented findings on the origins of human bipedalism and described an early member of the gorilla clade. Archaeologists uncovered rings of post molds at Fort Ancient and identified a pre-Inca solar observatory. Other discoveries included a Viking hoard and early evidence of winemaking and beekeeping.

Key developments in 2007 in the field of physical anthropology included new evidence for contrasting hypotheses for the origins of human bipedalism. A research team from the United Kingdom proposed a revisionary hypothesis for the evolutionary history of human bipedalism based on an analysis of Sumatran orangutan positional behaviour and locomotion. The researchers observed that hand-assisted bipedality gave orangutans access to multiple slender, flexible supports that could not otherwise be used and that climbing orangutans adjusted to the flexibility of branches by increasing knee and hip extension just as humans do when running on a springy surface. Their study suggested that hand-assisted arboreal bipedality and upright posture provided a selective advantage by providing the greatest safety when reaching for food with one hand and in crossing from the branches of one tree to another to reach additional food resources. It also hypothesized that hand-assisted bipedality was the most likely evolutionary precursor to straight-limbed human walking. Thus, according to this decidedly unconventional scenario, human bipedalism was an evolutionary retention from a common great ape ancestor rather than a hominin innovation, whereas the quadrupedal knuckle-walking exhibited by chimpanzees and gorillas was an evolutionarily derived mode of locomotion in response to the fragmentation of Miocene forest canopies.

In contrast, an American research team adopted the conventional assumption that the last common ancestor between apes and hominins was a quadrupedal knuckle walker, and they used a treadmill to test the energy efficiency of human bipedalism in comparison with chimpanzee quadrupedalism and bipedalism. Consistent with the long-standing hypothesis that bipedalism evolved to reduce locomotor energy costs, the researchers found that human walking was approximately 75% less costly in terms of oxygen consumption than either quadrupedal or bipedal walking in chimpanzees. Although the energy costs for the two forms of chimpanzee locomotion did not differ when the chimpanzees were analyzed as a group, four of the five chimpanzees in the study did exhibit statistically significant differences. For three of the four, quadrupedal locomotion was less costly; however, for one—a 33-year-old female—bipedalism was less costly than quadrupedalism. This finding was both unexpected and theoretically important. In comparison with her fellow subjects, the 33-year-old female presented a longer foot-ground contact time for each step, and her knee and hip flexion were relatively similar during both kinds of locomotion. In an evolutionary context, the authors speculated that variation in hind-limb extension, hind-limb length, foot-ground contact time, and step length among individuals in the last common ancestral population of the hominin and chimpanzee lineages could have provided the critical selection pressure for the development of the highly efficient bipedalism seen in more recent members of the genus Homo.

Extensive fossil evidence pertaining to bipedalism in early members of the genus Homo was also recently uncovered. An international research team reported newly excavated postcranial material (consisting of 32 bones) dating to 1.77 million years ago from Dmanisi (Georgia). The remains contained a partial skeleton of an adolescent and bones from three adults, including the first complete fossil hominin tibia, which was part of the most complete lower limb of any early Homo individual. The postcranial anatomy showed a surprising combination of primitive features (such as small body size and low degree of torsion of the humerus) and derived traits (such as modern humanlike body proportions and lower-limb morphology). Long legs, a forward-pointing big toe, and the presence of both transverse and longitudinal foot arches indicated that biomechanical efficiency for long-distance walking and energy expenditure for running would have been equivalent to that exhibited by modern humans. The length of the legs, similar to that of modern humans, probably reflected selection for locomotor efficiency in Homo, since energy expenditure for locomotion is inversely proportional to leg length in bipeds.

A Japanese-Ethiopian research team discovered nine gorilla-like teeth (one canine and eight molars) from deposits in the Afar Rift of Ethiopia. Dated at 10 million–10.5 million years old, the teeth represented at least three individuals from the newly defined extinct ape species, Chororapithecus abyssinicus. The large molars were specialized both for shredding fibrous vegetation and for chewing hard, abrasive food items. The authors proposed that Chororapithecus might have been a basal member of the gorilla clade or, alternatively, a large ape whose dental adaptations were convergent with those of modern gorillas. The protogorilla hypothesis, if correct, would push back the date for the gorilla species split to between 10.5 million and 12 million years ago, at least 2 million years earlier than indicated by recent genetic-based dates. Because no African ape fossils dated between 7 million and 12 million years ago had previously been found (with the exception of the 9.5 million-year-old Samburupithecus from Kenya), some paleoanthropologists speculated that after apes first evolved in Africa over 20 million years ago, they migrated to Eurasia and eventually returned to Africa, where they gave rise to the gorilla, chimpanzee, and hominin clades. The new dental data, however, effectively negated the need for this postulated Eurasian sojourn for the ancestors of modern African apes.

An international research team described two African fossil hominin specimens from the Koobi Fora formation near Lake Turkana at Ileret, Kenya, that produced an unexpected chronology for the early members of the genus Homo. One specimen was a H. erectus calvaria (skullcap). It exhibited features of both Asian and African H. erectus, which thereby caused some paleoanthropologists to question whether the African specimens should continue to be placed in the separate taxon H. ergaster. The estimated age of the calvaria was 1.55 million years, and the estimated cranial capacity was only 691 cu cm (42.2 cu in), the smallest known adult cranial vault attributed to H. erectus. In overall appearance it most resembled the calvaria of an earlier Dmanisi juvenile and of a later specimen from Sambungmacan, Indon. The extremely small cranial dimensions of the new specimen indicated that H. erectus and H. habilis actually overlapped in size and that H. erectus might have displayed marked sexual dimorphism (given that the new specimen was female). The other described specimen was a H. habilis partial right maxilla that was dated at 1,440,000 years—a full 200,000 years later than any other H. habilis specimen. This date carried two extremely important evolutionary implications. First, the two species both lived in the Lake Turkana basin and overlapped chronologically for about 500,000 years. Second, H. habilis was unlikely to be directly ancestral to H. erectus through anagenesis (that is, a linear succession without branching), in contrast to numerous published phylogenies of hominins.

A study that included this 1.55-million-year-old fossil Homo erectus skullcap from Kenya indicated …

Archaeology

Eastern Hemisphere

In January 2007 David Whelan and his son Andrew retrieved what was hailed as the largest and most important Viking hoard found in Britain in 150 years. They found the treasure as they used metal detectors to search a muddy field on the outskirts of Harrogate in northern England. Thought to have been buried by a wealthy Viking about ad 927, the treasure consisted of 617 silver coins (some of which were struck in Afghanistan, Russia, and Scandinavia) and 65 other items, including a gold armband, ingots, and pieces of scrap silver—all of which had been placed inside an early 9th-century-ad French gilt-silver vessel.

The largest-known prehistoric ceremonial enclosure in Ireland was found at Lismullin (County Meath, Ire.) near Tara—a low hill that was the fabled birthplace of the Irish nation—according to Ronald Hicks of Ball State University, Muncie, Ind. Dated to between 1000 bc and ad 400 and measuring some 80 m (260 ft) in diameter, the enclosure was of a type known from other royal sites in Ireland. The enclosure was found during initial construction work on the controversial M3 motorway, which was being built to ease commuter traffic in Dublin. Local citizens had protested construction of the superhighway, which upon completion would cut through Tara.

A 7,000-year-old dwelling mound was discovered during highway construction near Oberröblingen, Ger. Dwelling mounds were the result of continuous human habitation atop an ever-growing accumulation of earlier building material and domestic debris. They were well known from the Middle East, the Balkans, and even South America, but this was the first such mound to be found in Western Europe. Excavated by Robert Ganslmeier and a team from the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Ger., the oval-shaped mound, which measured 100 × 60 × 2 m (330 × 200 × 7 ft), yielded abundant finds. Among these were pottery vessels, the grave of a child, and the remains of two ritually sacrificed young people and of several animals, including a horse, a calf, and numerous dogs.

Some 2,460 charred grape seeds and 300 grape skins that were discovered within the remains of a 6,500-year-old house at the Neolithic site Diliki Tash appeared to provide the earliest-known evidence for winemaking in Greece. According to Tania Valamoti of Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece, analysis of the grape remains confirmed that they were the result of wine pressings and that the grapes had come from either wild plants or a very early cultivar.

In the northern part of Athens, contractors who were digging foundations for a new building in the Menidi area came upon 13 rows of stone bleachers, which were thought to have been part of the famed 2,500-year-old amphitheatre of Acharnes. It was one of seven amphitheatres now known to have surrounded the city.

The earliest-known evidence for the colonization of Cyprus, and—perhaps more important—for maritime activity in the Mediterranean Sea, was found at Aspros on the Akamas Peninsula. Archaeologists recovered an assortment of pre-Neolithic chipped stone tools, which were dated to 14,000 years ago; the discovery pushed back by 2,000 years the earliest-known date for human activity on the island. A subsequent rise in sea level inundated part of the ancient settlement, the remains of which stretched more than 100 m (330 ft) from shore.

Excavations at Sagalassos, a Greco-Roman city in south-central Turkey, yielded fragments of an extraordinary white marble statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian (ruled ad 117–138) that included a head, a sandal-clad foot, and part of a leg. Discovered by Marc Waelkens and a team from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belg., the original statue was estimated to have been 4–5 m (13–16 ft) tall.

This head of a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian was excavated at Sagalassos, a site in Turkey.

Marc Waelkens/Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project

The discovery of engraved figures—many of them of wild bulls—chiseled about 15,000 years ago into the sandstone cliffs near Qurta on the Kom Ombo Plain about 640 km (400 mi) south of Cairo pushed back the earliest-known art in Egypt by some 7,000 years. According to Dirk Huyge of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, the largest of the more than 160 images found to date was nearly 2 m (7 ft) wide. Prior to the discovery, the earliest-known rock art in Egypt had been found at the 8,000-year-old site of el-Hosh.

The oldest wall painting in the Middle East was found at the 11,000-year-old Neolithic settlement of Djaʾde al-Mughara (Jaʿdat al-Magharah) in northern Syria on the Euphrates River, according to Eric Coqueugniot of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research. Geometric in design and painted in red, black, and white pigments, the work was 2 sq m (22 sq ft) in area and graced the wall of what was once a large circular communal dwelling with a wooden roof.

Amihai Mazar and a team from Hebrew University of Jerusalem recovered 30 clay-and-straw beehives at Tel Rehov, in Israel’s Bet Sheʾan Valley. The hives were made some 3,000 years ago and were the earliest-known evidence for commercial beekeeping.

A 35,000-year-old obsidian mining site on Mt. Takaharayama in Japan’s Tochigi prefecture yielded hundreds of stone tools, including eight trapezoidal stones that were thought to have been used for preparing animal hides. Previously, such mining activities were thought to have begun in Japan much more recently, during the Jomon Period, about 13,000 to 3,000 years ago.

Recent analysis of sediments from the site of Kuahuqiao at the mouth of the Yangtze River indicated that Chinese farmers began cultivating rice in the region nearly 8,000 years ago. According to Yongqiang Zong of Durham (Eng.) University, residents of the Stone Age community, who lived in wooden stilt houses perched atop the marshlands, built dams from burned and felled trees to retain seawater in rice paddies. An ancient dugout canoe and pottery made with wild rice as a binder were also recovered at the site.

An enormous sandstone slab with 42 etched figures was found in Australia’s Wollemi National Park. Paul Tacon and a team of researchers from Griffith University in Queensland who studied the figures believed that they had been carved less than 2,000 years ago and identified them as a pantheon of important and powerful Aboriginal ancestral beings. The sandstone slab was 100 m (330 ft) long and 50 m (175 ft) wide.

More than 70 headless skeletons that were unearthed in a 3,000-year-old cemetery at Teouma on the island of Efate in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu might reveal the mysterious origin of the seafaring Lapita, who were thought to be the earliest-known ancestors of the Polynesians. The Polynesians were known to have colonized Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa about 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. According to Matthew Spriggs of the Australian National University, Canberra, seven skulls were found. He suggested that the Lapita might have removed the heads of their dead and placed them in household shrines, a practice followed by their precolonial descendants in part of Melanesia. DNA analysis and other tests of the bones were expected to confirm whether—as many scholars contended—the Lapita originally came from Southeast Asia via Indonesia, the Philippines, and, last, Taiwan.

Western Hemisphere

Numerous archaeological discoveries made in 2007 ranged across the Americas and spanned much of the time that those continents had been inhabited by humans. Eighteen thousand years ago a site in northeastern Nevada known as the Bonneville Estates Rockshelter lay near the high-water mark of Lake Bonneville, which was then a huge inland sea. For thousands of years from about 11,000 bc, small groups of hunter-gatherers visited the rockshelter at irregular intervals and left behind a well-preserved record of their activities. Archaeologist Ted Goebel and his colleagues uncovered bone needles, nets for trapping rabbits, and other fragile artifacts preserved in the dry layers of the site. The Paleo-Indian and Archaic inhabitants of the rockshelter were not big-game hunters as previously believed. They lived on a varied diet of game such as pronghorn sheep, plant foods, and insects such as grasshoppers and then abandoned the site between 9000 and 6000 bc during a prolonged arid period. Later occupants were more sedentary than their predecessors and relied heavily on plant foods, especially edible grasses. Human occupation at Bonneville Estates continued until as recently as ad 1350.

Fort Ancient in southwestern Ohio was an important ceremonial complex in the Hopewell culture. A remote-sensing survey conducted in preparation for an erosion-control project at the site revealed subsurface anomalies that were investigated in 2006 and 2007. A team led by archaeologist Robert Riordan discovered two concentric rings of post molds (markings in the soil where posts once stood). The outer ring, about 60 m (200 ft) in diameter, would have been made up of about 200 wooden posts about 23 cm (9 in) thick and set in place with rocks in a shallow trench. Each post might have stood between 3 and 3.5 m (10 and 15 ft) high. The inner circle was about 3.5 m inside the outer ring, and it would have held shallower lower posts. At the centre of the circle was a fire pit that contained burned soil. The purpose of the circles was unknown, but radiocarbon dating suggested that they were made between ad 60 and 240 and that the fire pit remained in use between ad 250 and 420.

Ancient Panamanians were eating domesticated corn (maize), manioc, and arrowroot as early as 7000 bc. Using a new technique known as starch grain analysis, University of Calgary, Alta., researcher Ruth Dickau recovered identifiable microscopic traces of plants from the stone tools used to process them. Dickau’s work showed that the humid tropical areas of Panama were an important land bridge for the southward spread of corn farming from the more arid regions in Mexico and for the northward spread of manioc and arrowroot from South America.

Human skeletons found at an archaeological site called Tecuaque, near Mexico City, provided grisly confirmation of Aztec practices of human sacrifice. The site was a flourishing Aztec community of 5,000 Zultepec Indians at the time of the Spanish conquest, and conquistador Hernán Cortés gave it the name Tecuaque, which means “where people were eaten.” Archaeologists unearthed the remains of some 550 victims who had been sacrificed and dismembered by Aztec priests. According to Mexican archaeologist Enrique Martínez, Aztec warriors briefly fought and then captured a caravan that included mestizos, mulattos, Maya, and Caribbean Indians who were serving the conquistadors. Martínez said that the prisoners were sacrificed a few at a time and that knife and teeth marks on some of the bones hinted at ritual consumption of human flesh. When the Zultepec learned that the Spaniards were coming to avenge the killings, they threw their victims’ bones and possessions into wells, concealing all material evidence of the sacrifices until those items were unearthed by archaeologists centuries later.

Ancient Andean Indians tracked the rising and setting of the sun and the movements of stars to monitor the passage of the seasons. The heavens provided a calendar for planting, harvest, and other agricultural activities. Peruvian archaeologist Ivan Ghezzi and British archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles identified an ancient observatory in the Casma-Sechín basin of the coastal Peruvian desert 386 km (240 mi) north of Lima. Thirteen towers from 1.8 to 6 m (6 to 20 ft) high extend over a distance of 30.5 m (100 ft) along a ridge. The towers, known as the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, are visible from a nearby complex of concentric masonry walls enclosing ceremonial buildings built in about 300 bc. Ghezzi and Ruggles determined how ancient astronomers would have measured the passage of the seasons by observing the rising and setting of the sun behind the towers from observation points on either side of the ridge.

A study of the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo in north coastal Peru revealed that the towers at …

Iron was a valuable commodity in the American colonies, which made the early 2007 discovery of the first blast furnace in North America one of unusual importance. The site, near Richmond, Va., first came to light when amateur archaeologist Ralph Lovern spotted building timbers eroded from the banks of Falling Creek. A subsequent geophysical survey at the location revealed a large magnetic anomaly that was consistent with the remains of an iron furnace. No signs of the water wheel, bellows, and flume had come to light, however. Historical documents recorded that the ironworks were established in 1619 and that the blast furnace would have been capable of processing up to 600 tons of ore per year. Although the furnace was destroyed and its ironworkers killed in attacks by Powhatan Indians in 1622, the site marked the beginnings of heavy industry in North America.

Some of the most interesting discoveries came from sites for which historical documents amplified the archaeological finds. A recently discovered 1830s document indicated that Abraham Lincoln owned his first property in New Salem, Ill., the log-cabin village where he initially worked as a clerk at the Offutt Store. Lincoln and another clerk, Charles Maltby, appeared to have purchased the store in 1832. In an effort to locate and learn about the property, excavations were carried out at New Salem in 2006. The excavations uncovered part of the original Offutt Store cellar and yielded several objects, including glass items and a slate pencil, that might have been part of the store’s inventory. Archaeologists hoped to confirm the shape and size of this and other original buildings at New Salem, one of which may have been more than 9 m (30 ft) long.

A long-term excavation of Hare Harbour, an archaeological site at Île du Petit Mécatina, about 965 km (600 mi) northeast of Quebec, revealed a busy seasonal harbour and shoreline workshop that were used by Basque fishers during the 17th century. Originally thought to be a whaling settlement, Hare Harbour was in fact a trading station where Basques fished for cod and traded timber. In addition to glass beads dating to between 1675 and 1750, excavators found two soapstone whale-oil lamps and a cooking pot, which suggested that the Basques may have employed Inuit women to help with the work. Additional investigations were to venture underwater, where large earthenware jugs and 18th-century gin bottles had been found.